Install Grafana and InfluxDB on CentOS 7

This will be our first series on how to do smart monitoring and visualization of your entire Infrastructure. The entire series will concentrate on tools like Grafana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Telegraf and maybe others to come.

Since this is the first article in the series, I’ll make an introductory definition of tools that we’ll be working with:

InfluxDB is an open-source time series database developed written in Go by InfluxData. InfluxDB is optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data for metrics analysis. This can be installed on a single server or a clustered.

Telegraf is an agent written in Go for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics from local or remote services. It is installed on all devices that need to be monitored, and all metrics collected by Telegraf are pushed stored on InfluxDB.

Grafana is an open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB. Data stored on InfluxDB will be visualized using Grafana.

Prometheus is a tool used for systems and service monitoring. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true. Metrics stored on Prometheus can be visualized using Grafana.

This will start the grafana-server process as the grafana user, which is created during package installation. The default HTTP port is 3000, and default user and group is admin. By default Grafana will log to /var/log/grafana.

The default configuration file is /etc/grafana/grafana.in with sqlite3 database store located at /var/lib/grafana/grafana.db

Open firewall port for Grafana

If you have a running firewalld service, consider opening port 3000 of you’re going to access the dashboard over the network.